Authoritarian Co-optation in the Age of Globalisation: Evidence from Hong Kong

The existing literature on authoritarian survival, implicitly or explicitly, assumes that political challenges faced by authoritarian regimes are all domestic. I argue that globalisation exposes authoritarian regimes to new sources of threat. In particular, capital mobility forces authoritarian regimes to deal with not only those who dare to voice out dissatisfaction, but also those who exit. While repression may be the best strategy to silence the vocal, co-optation would be a more effective tool to retain the runaway. It is, however, often impossible to co-opt all the capital owners. As such, authoritarian regimes have to be selective when choosing co-optation targets. I argue that authoritarian regimes would co-opt renowned firms because these firms yield the greatest demonstration effect. Hong Kong provides an interesting case to illustrate my arguments. Beijing strategically co-opted the stakeholders of renowned firms in Hong Kong in order to solve the city's pervasive confidence crisis prior to 1997. I test my arguments with data on firms listed on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange. I find that firms owned by well-known and prestigious elite families were more likely to build political connections with Beijing. To test the causal linkage more rigorously, I use both the genetic matching and instrumental variable approaches. The empirical results provide strong support to my arguments.     

Securing Hong Kong’s identity in the colonial past: strategic essentialism and the umbrella movement

ABSTRACT

The Umbrella Movement in Hong Kong is the most radical political movement to have taken place in the former British colony since 1967 anti-colonial demonstrations. Using empirical evidence obtained from activists who participated in the Umbrella Movement, this paper explains how Hong Kong’s youth are looking simultaneously to both the past and future to secure their identity in the colonial past even as some hope to achieve ultimate secession from Mainland rule. Racism and anti-Mainland hostilities in Hong Kong are the result of nostalgia and the insurrectionary impulse akin to the millenarianism of social movements founded on suffering and loss that continually seek the recovery of pasts of which they are now deprived. We illuminate how, to young activists, the Umbrella Movement presents hope for a future embedded in the past that remains one the territory and former colony may still aspire toward.     

Afrocultural Integrity and the Social Development of African-American Children

SUMMARY

In this paper the role of culture in the social development of African-American youth was explored, and an Afrocultural social ethos was advanced as a concept for investigating the social functioning. Study 1 found no significant gender differences on the social ethos variable in third and sixth graders (47 boys, 43 girls) ratings of self, family or friends. However, boys reported more delinquent behaviors than did girls, and friend's social ethos was predictive of fewer aggressive and delinquent behaviors. Although no significant gender differences on social ethos emerged among the sixth and seventh graders (54 boys, 47 girls) in Study 2, family ethos was predictive of empathic concern while the ethos of friends predicted greater perspective taking. Gender was the only significant predictor of peer-rated helping behavior, with girls judged to demonstrate such behaviors more than boys. Discussion focused on directions for basic and applied research, with an emphasis on African-American men and the importance of mobilizing indigenous community resources.     

香港、澳门、新加坡行政主导比较

适应社会发展和高效决策的需要,行政主导已成为国际社会普遍的政治现象。由于社会条件的差异,各国各地区行政主导的类型和表现不同,绩效不一。本文对香港与澳门、香港与新加坡的行政主导作比较研究,从政治制度、政府运作、社会条件等不同角度探求了不同形式行政主导的共性与差异。     

美国联邦碳排放限额交易立法解析

关于建立一个全国性的碳排放限额交易计划的问题,已经在美国国会获得了强烈的政治考虑,多部联邦法律草案勾画出了未来联邦碳排放限额交易计划的基本架构,只是具体细节的设计上存在微小差异。但是,拟建联邦碳排放限额交易计划的温室气体减排潜力有限,且因难以调和的利益冲突而近期获得通过的希望渺茫。     

Re-branding without re-developing: constraints of Hong Kong's ‘Asia's World City’ brand (1997–2007)

Abstract

Interest among academics towards Hong Kong's global status has gradually waned since 1997. However, identifying Hong Kong's position on the international platform is essential if the Special Administrative Region's competitiveness is to be distinguished from that of regional rivals. The positioning challenge not only results from the sovereignty retrocession, but also from the rapid pace of globalization and the intensified competition from major cities in the Greater China Region. Instead of focusing on the much-researched topic of the direct competition between Hong Kong and Shanghai or Singapore, an exploration of Hong Kong's hitherto little-researched re-branding experience not only throws light on Hong Kong Special Administrative Region's policy orientation, but is also valuable in understanding how other cities in the region conducted similar exercises. This article reviews the overall evolution of the ‘Asia's World City’ (AWC) discourse as promoted by the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region from 1997 to 2007. It starts by reviewing the international identity of post-colonial Hong Kong as background to the discourse, in order to reconstruct various theoretical assumptions that led to the re-branding exercise. The second section examines the purpose and evolution of the AWC campaign, and identifies the problems within the discourse. The concluding section focuses on the unrealized theoretical assumptions and other administrative and ideological constraints that the HKSARG faced in the exercise as a means to explaining the overall limited achievements of the campaign and proposes possible ways to remedy the shortcomings.     

OBA2: An Onion approach to Binary code Authorship Attribution

A critical aspect of malware forensics is authorship analysis. The successful outcome of such analysis is usually determined by the reverse engineer's skills and by the volume and complexity of the code under analysis. To assist reverse engineers in such a tedious and error-prone task, it is desirable to develop reliable and automated tools for supporting the practice of malware authorship attribution. In a recent work, machine learning was used to rank and select syntax-based features such as n-grams and flow graphs. The experimental results showed that the top ranked features were unique for each author, which was regarded as an evidence that those features capture the author's programming styles. In this paper, however, we show that the uniqueness of features does not necessarily correspond to authorship. Specifically, our analysis demonstrates that many “unique” features selected using this method are clearly unrelated to the authors' programming styles, for example, unique IDs or random but unique function names generated by the compiler; furthermore, the overall accuracy is generally unsatisfactory. Motivated by this discovery, we propose a layered Onion Approach for Binary Authorship Attribution called OBA2. The novelty of our approach lies in the three complementary layers: preprocessing, syntax-based attribution, and semantic-based attribution. Experiments show that our method produces results that not only are more accurate but have a meaningful connection to the authors' styles.     

溢价发行可以休矣

股票溢价发行制度是中国股市的问题之源,要解决中国股市的问题,必须坚决废止溢价发行制度。同时应当采取缩减非溢价股、注销部分已经超额分红的非溢价股等办法,以解决溢价发行制度遗留下来的问题。     

企业青工“提素导航”规划活动的探索与思考

人力资源是企业实现跨越式发展的重要因素,在新形势下,企业在人才队伍的培养方面发展空间依然很大.实施青年"提素导航"规划活动,全面提高青工队伍的整体素质,不断丰富、发展和增强企业的人力资本,是团组织主动适应企业发展对人才的要求,顺应青年职工对成才发展的愿望的一项重要工作.